Business processes generally involve multiple steps executed at different times and at different locations, each generating one or more documents. These documents are often stored in multiple databases that each use a different format, which can make it more difficult to reconstruct the process based on the information in the multiple documents.
A business process can contain different types of process steps, e.g., fully manual executed steps, partially manual steps supported by an information technology (IT) system, or fully automated steps executed by an IT system only.
Business processes steps that are supported or executed by an IT system usually are characterized in that they can be measured easily, if the relevant data is saved e.g. in a database during the step execution. Fully manual steps need to be entered into an IT system by hand so that they can be used for an IT based process optimization.
Business process management (BPM) is a management discipline that focuses on improving corporate performance by managing and optimizing a company's business processes. It can therefore be described as a “process optimization process.”
One part of process optimization is process monitoring. Monitoring encompasses the tracking of individual processes, so that information on their state can be easily seen, and statistics on the performance of the processes can be provided.
Monitoring process instances generally involves extracting data of process steps, detecting the process steps that belong to one single process instance, and then reconstructing the process flow of a process instance based off the data of the steps. This allows the use of data for determining the key performance indicators (KPIs, sometimes called measures) and dimensions that can be applied in analyzing the process instances.
There are several modelling notations for business processes available, such as event-driven process chain (EPC), business process model and notation (BPMN), and the like. For example, EPC is a type of flowchart used for business process modelling. EPCs can be used to describe an enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation, and for business process improvement.
There are also many tools for process monitoring on the market, e.g., Process Performance Manager by Software AG, QPR ProcessAnalyzer by QPR Software, and Fluxicon Disco by Fluxicon.
Process Performance Manager (PPM) provides the user with a complete solution for business process monitoring (i.e., process controlling), which unites extraction, processing, query, and analysis of process data.
However, when using PPM, data may be extracted from multiple different source systems, e.g., a structured query language (SQL) database, a comma-separated values (CSV) files, etc. These different sources can be saved in extensible markup language (XML) files in event format and imported by PPM as process fragments for process reconstruction.
Thus, during the process of reconstructing an original process, the system will extract the data from these individual source systems and save it in a PPM-specific XML data format, e.g., event format. This source data will be imported as process fragments into a PPM database.
Once the individual process fragments are gathered, it is necessary to combine them into a complete process instance. This combining and ordering process can be referred to as a process merge.
Then, once the process instance is reconstructed, the system can create corresponding KPIs and dimensions for the process instance and the process elements. The prepared data can then be saved in the PPM database and be made available for further analysis by PPM.
However, because the various process fragments can be stored in different formats, in many cases it has been impossible to automatically reconstruct the process instance. In such situations, some human intervention is required to fully reconstruct the process instance from the process fragments.